Quick Guide to Choosing an Affiliate Program Manager

In case you haven’t yet read the cover story of the Winter 2013 Visibility magazine, I’d like to draw your attention to it today pardon this “let me toot my horn” post. Below you may see the cover of this newest Visibility issue, and I am proud to see my name on it.

In my newest published article I tackled the popular subject of choosing the right affiliate program manager. I started with:

One of the most commonly committed, and altogether one of the deadliest, merchant mistakes is adopting what I call an autopilot approach to affiliate marketing. In part, this tendency is conditioned by a fallacy that affiliate marketing is so simple that all you have to do is just launch your affiliate program, announce it in your blog and in affiliate forums, insert it into affiliate program directories, and affiliates will come. They indeed will. However, unless your affiliate program is closely managed and each affiliate is scrupulously reviewed before approval and monitored after approval, you may run into some serious troubles down the road.

With the search landscape continuously changing and online environment (and the way people use it) constantly evolving, even for affiliates long gone are the days when one could enjoy passive residual income (read: one hardly requiring day-to-day involvement). For merchants/advertisers running affiliate programs the autopilot approach has always been a sure recipe for failure [more in another one of my printed articles here].

But how do you choose the right affiliate manager for your program? What qualifications should you pay attention to? Is it better to hire/train someone in-house, or outsource the management to an external agency. These and many other related questions are answered in this newest article of mine. Read it for free here.